June 2009

I’ve been using Coda for a while now, and it’s become my web development application of choice. There are quite a few great web development applications out there (read “18 Wonderful IDEs for Windows, Mac, and Linux“) but if you’re a Mac user, Coda is easily one of the best.

Here are 20 excellent Coda tips to increase productivity that I’ve gathered during my use of Coda so far.

1. Set Your Preferences

There are a few things I had to change right away when I first started using Coda. These are all found in Coda’s preferences.

I never use a GUI CSS editor so I set Coda to always open CSS files with the text editor.

Website Navigation Design all comes within the website interface category. Its crucial to make it easy to use, and find for the client. This doesn’t mean it has to be simple though. I have looked at some amazing websites, that have integrated an amazing menu navigation design into their website. They have been creative with their designs, and made it easy to use and beautiful at the same time.

Branded07

SohTanAka

There are numerous ways a Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can improves our web design and it’s not difficult to implement a few to make our website looks better and more user-friendly. Listed below are 10 cool CSS tricks that will improve your web designs instantly. The good thing about these tutorials is that they make complicated CSS tricks look easy (and you don’t have extensive coding work to do!).

If you are new to web design and development, I suggest you bookmark this article for further reference in future.

1. Image gallery with hover box preview

Isn’t it nice to allow your users to preview thumbnail images by just rolling their mouse over? The Hoverbox Tutorial offers free coding sample and detail guides on how to do just that. If you wish to build a fast loading image gallery then this is a must-read.

Another great month within the graphic and design community with new illustrator tutorials, Photoshop tutorials, blogging articles, web design articles and a wide selection of the best freebies released on the web in May.

Illustrator Tutorials

Up until recently, when an item required a few small fixes, we would reject or disable the template and ask that the author make the requested changes. We admit that it was unfair to expect an author to start the submission process from scratch all because of one image or help file. As such, we’ve now implemented a new “soft reject” and “soft disable” feature for these instances.

How’s It Work?

Go to your account page and visit the “hidden” tab.

If you see the words “Soft Disabled” in brackets, you can update the item and resubmit.

To edit and resubmit a soft-disabled file, click on the file in question, then go to the “edit” tab. You can then upload the requested changes.

Our Goal

For this tutorial our goal is to create a widget that will pull records from a database at set intervals and display them on our page. We will be using PHP and MySQL to extract and display our data, and jQuery to animate the refresh transition.

Lately I’ve seen quite a few requests on Twitter and other places for multilevel menus using jQuery and/or CSS. There are quite a few ways to accomplish this and it largely depends on what your needs are.

In this article we’ll take a quick look at several common multilevel menu options and then I’ll show you how to create a “mega menu”.

10 Basic Multilevel Menu Options

Here are a few of the basic drop down menus available from around the web. Don’t let the basic design examples fool you, you can easily customize these with CSS to make them as pretty as your design.

PHP is a widely used programming language for web development. Although there are a lot of alternative programming languages for web development such as ASP and Ruby, but PHP is still the most popular among them.

So, what makes PHP so popular? PHP is so popular because it is relatively easy to learn compare to other language. Furthermore, there are a lot of great tutorials for beginner to get started. Although there are a lot of resources for us, but coding a site from scratch is very tough. Luckily, there are a lot of reliable PHP Framework which can shorten the development time. These frameworks are supported by huge community and they are willing to help if you face any problems.

Without talking much, let’s start to look into these 22 open source PHP frameworks:

25 free must download design programs, the article features a range of different design programs including alternative programs for some of the most popular design programs such as Photoshop, flash and illustrator. A great collection of programs available for free which is perfect while currently suffering from a recession.

Image Editing

Very short about myself. I’m a student at Stockholm University majoring in Web design and graphics. I’m just doing my second year here so I’m not a “design-guru” yet, but I’m slowly getting there :)

As you can guess, I’m very keen on all this web design stuff, all the gimmicks and widgets and my blog will be about this. I’m constantly searching for and finding some useful things, like web design tutorials online, and here I will be posting all the most interesting things I’ve found so far. Killer design labs, tips from the top professionals and simply some ABC’s of web design – you’ll find it all here. After all somebody’s got to start learning at some point. And I’ll be learning together with you. Hope you’ll find my blog not too boring. Anyway don’t judge too harsh, I’m just learning :)

This tutorial talks about the benefits of saving your picture files as PNG instead of Jpeg, or Gif. Jpegs are only good for Photos with “a lot” of colours. PNG are good for saving clipart and photoquality pictures as well. It is a very versatile picture format.

But, gif are still the best for animated gifs.

Benefits

Small Picture size

No blurryness when saving images with more then 256 colours or less.

Have better colour saturation when saving images with more then 256 colours.

Sample of PNG file saved with MS Paint. Notice how sharp the clip art and vibrant the photo background looks. The Strawberry clipart has nice sharp solid colours and the photo background looks like a sharp vibrant photo.

30 Illustrator Videos To turn You Into An Expert. A collection of great video tutorials which you can learn the basics and also advanced illustrator techniques. If you want to learn the necessary skills to becoming an expert then this is perfect post for you. The post contains range of video tutorials covering the best aspects of illustrator.

A confession: I am a big fan of WordPress. I strongly believe WordPress is the best (and most popular) CMS/blogging platform for any beginners who wish to start a new website. And, except for the old websites I started since year 2002; I run all my websites in WordPress nowadays.

“How do I start a website?” – This is the most common question I get from my friends and relatives. Back in old times, in order to answer the question, I need to explain about HTML, FTP, database, WYSISYG software like Dreamweaver, and so on.